Martin Blocksidge was Head of English at the Royal Grammar School, Guildford, and Director of Studies at St. Dunstan's College, London. He is a former President of The English Association. Martin Blocksidge is the author of The Sacred Weapon: An Introduction to Pope's Satire, and editor and contributor to Teaching Literature and Shakespeare in Education (Continuum), as well as various articles on Shakespeare, nineteenth-century poetry, and the teaching of English literature.

Arthur Hallam’s
early death was the subject of Tennyson’s celebrated poem
In Memoriam. As a result of its popularity, Hallam became a legendary
figure, very much accepted on Tennyson’s terms as being almost
divinely gifted and of immense promise. While this representation
of Hallam has remained generally accepted, A Life Lived Quickly
seeks both to supplement and challenge it, offering a more detailed
and objective portrait of the man. That Hallam has a difficult relationship
with his father (himself a famous literary figure), suffered a mental
breakdown during his first year at Cambridge, and pursued an extremely
fraught love affair with Tennyson’s sister in the face of
opposition from both families, are important but largely unknown
aspects of his life. The author also repudiates the often-made suggestion
that Hallam and Tennyson may have had a homosexual relationship.

As well as examining Hallam’s published writings,
the book makes liberal use of his letters, of which a collected
edition has been in existence since 1981, and includes treatments
of hitherto unpublished poems and more recently discovered letters.
Apart from presenting Arthur Hallam as a complex and interesting
character in his own right, the book offers insight into the literary
culture of early nineteenth-century England. In devoting attention
to Hallam’s time at Eton and Cambridge, the book also deals
in detail with the experience of being educated in those unreformed
institutions.

Hardback ISBN:

978-1-84519-418-5

Hardback Price:

£25.00 / $49.95

Release Date:

October 2010

Page Extent / Format:

272 pp. / 229 x 152 mm

Illustrated:

Yes

List of Illustrations, Preface & Acknowledgements

chapter one
Naturally Disputatious: Father and Son, 1811–1822

chapter two
An Unreformed Education: Eton College, 1822–1827

chapter three
A Farewell to the South: Italy, 1827–1828

chapter four
‘Cambridge I hate intensely’: Trinity College,
1828–1829

chapter five
Living Awfully Fast: The Apostles and Somersby, 1830–1831

chapter six
A Young Man of Letters, 1831–1833The Last of Cambridge
Mainly in London

chapter seven
A Creature of Great Promise: Death and Transfiguration

Notes, Bibliography & Index

In
the penultimate paragraph of his biography, Martin Blocksidge
writes:
‘It is as a phenomenon just beyond the reach of physical reality
that Hallam has largely been perceived since his death. It
has served so many to grant him his own special status: superhuman,
almost supernatural, iconic, but bearing only a glancing reference
to the man of flesh and blood.’
... It is quickly apparent that Blocksidge’s purpose in
this fine survey of Hallam’s 22 years of life is to restore
flesh and blood to these fugitive remains. Nowhere is this
more potently successful than in his account of the idyllic
Somersby episodes of 1830 when Hallam fell in love with Emily
Tennyson and produced what are easily his best poems, called
in the manuscript notebook in which they are inscribed ‘Somersby
Sonnets’ and ‘Sonnets written after my return from Somersby’.
Because, as Blocksidge says, these poems look outwards to the loveliness of the settings and to the tenderness of
the beloved, they are paradoxically more revealing about Hallam’s
personality than most of his other poems. Importantly he says
that from this moment Hallam’s involvement with the Tennyson
family increasingly centred on Emily rather than on Alfred.
This jolts one into a redefining of our picture of the Alfred/Arthur
relationship and it is like a breath of fresh air blowing
over perceptions, assumptions and judgments figuring in many
biographical presentations of Tennyson.
... It means of course that we must see Tennyson’s In
Memoriam not only as a memory of Arthur Hallam but also
as a memory of Arthur’s courtship of Emily. This is why the
setting of Somersby is so important. Blocksidge opens this
vein and prompts these further speculations though he does
not develop them. It must be remembered that Hallam’s intent
was to marry Emily – the whole movement of these, his last
years, was moulded by this driving desire. There is thus a
striking resonance in Tennyson’s having chosen to end his
great elegy with a marriage, so bringing Hallam’s quest for
marital fulfilment into a correspondingly powerful imaginative
poetic conclusion.
... While Hallam’s relationship with Emily may be a central
issue in the book, other issues are treated with equal dexterity.
For example, Hallam’s distress on having to leave schoolfriends
highlights the essentially lonely side of his nature and explains
to a great degree his pull to the gregarious world of debating
which he relished both at Eton and at Cambridge. Also the
problem of Gladstone and Hallam’s acquaintance is succinctly
and sensitively dealt with, as in this extract:
... In 1829, two years after his departure from Eton,
Gladstone’s feelings about Hallam were still peculiarly intense,
as an entry in his diary for the 14th of September that year
shows. […] Gladstone sounds wounded and betrayed. The entry
is embarrassed and oblique, its subject remaining anonymous
throughout, though easily identifiable. Gladstone seems to
be confronting a series of emotions which he would otherwise
prefer to evade. Other potentially problematic aspects of
the life are treated with similar delicacy; while Henry Hallam
figures large in the outline of Arthur’s upbringing and provokes
dislike in the reader, as he did his own contemporaries, here
Blocksidge softens the effect with a sympathy and compassion
that enriches the portrayal.
... The book is graced with choice expressions (Tennyson’s
‘fleet but flimsy’ poems addressed to young ladies, ‘real
or imagined’, for example), the research is rigorous and the
judgements are fair and rounded. This is an extremely worthy
tribute to its subject and it is pleasing to have it appear
in the bicentennial year.
Roger Evans, Tennyson
Research Bulletin

It
is admirable in many ways: superbly researched, judicious,
comprehensive, and very readable. For the first time we have
something approaching
the real Hallam, a sense of what he was, and what he might
have been.Essays in Criticism, January
2013

Hallam became an intimate of the whole Tennyson family in Lincolnshire and fell
deeply in love with Tennyson’s sister Emily. But Henry Hallam
sternly imposed conditions: the young people were not to
see each other or communicate until after Hallam’s twenty-first
birthday, which was February 1832. In retrospect Henry’s
behaviour looks unbearably harsh. In fairness to him, however,
it needs to be remembered that Hallam did not have a profession
or independent means, was supposed to be training for a career
in the law, and neglected his legal studies in order to promote
his friend Tennyson’s poetry. No one was to know that Hallam’s
tiredness, headaches, and high colour were symptoms of a
propensity to aneurism which would suddenly kill him the
following year.
... Blocksidge’s biography
tells the whole of this story with great tact and skill,
and provides new information about
the young man’s life. Hallam’s Eton years
are particularly well handled. Hallam was at Eton under John Keate, a successful
headmaster in the sense that the school was brought into control and became
a responsible teaching institution in his hands. But his methods were notorious.
Hew was a tiny man, just five feet high, and he would cope with problems of
discipline by administering mass floggings to the boys. There was undoubtedly
a sadistic side to Keate. Blocksidge is careful to be fair to Keate, though,
bringing out the good side of his work in the school and stressing that he
was a happily married man with a large family. He also points out Hallam’s
good fortune in meeting with the care of a quite different man , Edward Craven
Hawtrey, Hallam’s housemaster, gentle, patient, and humane where Keate was
blustering and abrasive. Hallam did not particularly like Eton – it would
not hold idyllic memories
for him as it did for many old Etonians – but he appreciated the great intellectual
strides he was able to make there.
... Hallam was formidably energetic; the substantial body of
writings left behind after his death is remarkable for such a short life. He
was also emotionally
precocious and more sexually aware than his older friend Tennyson. Hallam understood
his own appeal, and enjoyed the fact that other young men fell in love with
him. Gladstone, at Eton, was the first, and at Trinity College, Cambridge,
there were several; they included the fat, vain, generous Trinity undergraduate
Richard Monckton Milnes (later Lord Houghton) and, of course, Tennyson. The
degree to which Tennyson’s feeling for Hallam was sexual is hard to judge.
What is certain is that his feeling for Hallam, as a person, was decidedly
stronger than Hallam’s for him. Hallam venerated and promoted Tennyson’s prodigious
talent; Tennyson loved Hallam in all his aspects. After Hallam’s death, though,
Tennyson’s behaviour was in some ways mysterious. Despite being specifically
invited by Hallam’s father, Tennyson did not go to Hallam’s funeral
in January 1834 (whereas
Milnes did go). Tennyson also indulged himself in a round of Christmas jollities
in his native Lincolnshire in the winter of 1833, just a few weeks after Hallam’s
death.
... In later life Tennyson would robustly resist the notion that his affection
for Hallam was excessive. Nevertheless, questions about the extent to which
In Memoriam records a homosexual relationship have never gone away. After its
first publication Tennyson himself was nervous about possible homosexual readings
of his poem and changed some of its lines for subsequent editions. Blocksidge
confronts this topic head-on and discusses it with delicacy and discrimination,
exploring carefully and accurately the way such sexuality was understood in
Tennyson’s lifetime. Hallam Tennyson, the poet’s son, notoriously destroyed
a great many letters after his father’s death in 1892, and subsequently suppressed
many facts in Alfred
Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (1897). He was working in the
aftermath of the Oscar Wilde scandal, and was “influenced by the emergence
of the first public British literary homosexual” (255). Blocksidge’s conclusions
are as balanced and reasonable as the evidence is ever likely to
permit. This is a thoroughly
researched and rewarding biography and a valuable contribution to Tennyson
studies.
John Batchelor, Victorian Studies

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